Cuckoo's Egg

XII

Ellud paced the floor and flung his arms out: "I can't cover this!"

"You don't have to." Duun stayed seated. "I'm taking him this afternoon. I'll want the copter on the roof, I'll want the plane at Trusa, no slip-ups; take one off the line. I'll take it myself."

"Gods, your license is expired. I won't have it. You don't fly these damn things nowadays, the damn computers do. I'll get you a pilot." Ellud threw that out and lost his case.

"Do that. One hour. I'm headed out." Duun went for the door.

"They'll have my post, they'll move the minute you're clear of the roof, I'll have councillors at this door."

"Watch Shbit, that's all. I'll get him back for you."

"The Guild won't take him!"

"Is that hope they will or hope they won't?"

Ellud stood there with his mouth open. Duun left.

Thorn hurried; he had a bundle under his arm that was a change of clothes, his and Duun's and Duun's gray cloak, wrapped around things they needed from the bath and tied with a cord; he had new winter-clothes on, quilted coat, baggy trousers, quilted boots: so did Duun, striding along beside him to the elevator.

"Where are we going, Duun?" Half protest and half question, third time posed. (Have I broken some rule, have I made Duun mad?) But he could not read Duun now, except that there were secrets and Duun was in a great hurry to get him out-(Outside?) He had not worn pants and coat since Sheon, in the coldest weather. Had never worn boots. It was only the beginning of fall.)

(He knows what I told Sagot. I've done something wrong! We're running again, like we ran from Sheon-men with guns, people are hunting us- But that's crazy. They wouldn't. I haven't talked to anyone I shouldn't, I haven't done anything-)

(Have I?)

The elevator door opened. Duun went through last and used a card to operate it. The elevator shot up and up, past all the floors between them and the roof.

The door whisked open in the cupola. Beyond the windows was true sky, gray cloud, a copter with its blades turning. Guards were waiting there to open the door for them and the wind skirled in with bitter chill. "Head down!" Duun yelled at him and ran, ducking low when he got near the copter. Thorn remembered that, ran, with the wind of the blades burning his face. He kept low until he reached the copter, and clambered in like Duun did, as fast as he could, flung himself into the seat and started fastening straps. (Like the simulator. But this isn't. This is real.) The copter upped power and surged upward with a vengeance. The tops of Dsonan's tall buildings spun dizzily into view, the deep chasms of rail-courses and maintenance-ways, the distant port with the gray light shining off the water beneath a smear of clouds.

"We're going to the airport," Duun told him, shouting in his ear. "We've got a plane waiting for us."

Thorn looked at Duun with question available to be read. Pleading.

"We're going up to Avenen," Duun shouted at him. "The Guild headquarters. You'd better settle your mind on this trip, minnow. As many hatani as they can muster are going to be coming in there and you're going to have to do it this time or not at all. There won't be a second chance."

"For what?"

"To get you Guild protection, that's what."

They ran from the copter to a building and shed their quilted winter gear for suits that hugged the body. Attendants impersonal as the meds worked at fastenings, jerking at them, two at a time, rough in their frantic haste: masks next, that dangled about their necks, and helmets with a microphone inside. "Run," Duun said then, bending to snatch up the baggage, and they ran, out the door attendants held open for them, into a thunderous noisy building open at either end, where a plane sat with its fans at idle, a dip-nosed machine with stubby backswept wings. "This thing uses a runway," Duun yelled over the noise. "We're going to roll out from here-go round behind the wing, there's a ladder."

There was, pushed up against the plane. The canopy was up. Duun tossed the baggage to a guard, scrambled up the ladder and Thorn hit the treads behind him, hampered by the suit that restrained his limbs, panting when he reached the wing surface and crawled over the side close on Duun's tail. There was a pilot and co-pilot and two more seats in back in a cockpit that hardly looked big enough for the seats up front: Duun trod on one seat and dropped into place in the second, grabbed complicated belts and fastened them, and Thorn slid into the one beside him-belts like the simulator. Plug-ins for the mask hoses between their legs: Duun showed him and rammed it home. "Communications switch," Duun's voice came over the speaker over his ear, and Duun turned a face unrecognizable in an insect-like mask to show him the three way sliding switch and button on the side. The canopy was sliding forward with a whine of hydraulics. The pilot turned his head and made some signal with an uplifted hand to Duun and Duun made one back. The pilot turned around but the co-pilot was handling things: the fans picked up and the plane began to roll out of the building, faster and faster under open, overcast sky, the tires bumping on uneven pavings, the Dsonan skyline to their left unreal as a city window-view.

Faster still. They swung out onto a long expanse of concrete and the engine whine increased. The force slammed them back as the plane made its run and thundered out over the river, pulled a sharp bank and showed river for a long dizzy moment until the pilot decided to fly rightwise up again.

"Gods," Thorn said. His heart raced as clouds shredded past and still the climb kept up. (Why this fast? Why this sudden? What's Duun up to?) "How fast can this plane go?"

"Mach two plus if it has to. It's a courier plane-armed, in case you should wonder. And in case you should wonder again, yes, there's a reason. It's problems on the ground I'm worried about. I don't expect trouble, but there's that remote chance. There's a remote chance of trouble even up here. There's a ghota unit over in Hoguni province that's got one of these and I'm worried where its orders come from."

"Ghota? Aren't they guards?"

"Hired. Warrior guild. One of two. The kosan and the ghota. Our friends up front are kosanin. They take one service for life. Ghotanin rent themselves out; you don't trust them until you know how long their contract's for and whether you're the only one paying them. Like one-year wives. They're always hunting for their next advantage. Kosanin won't serve with them. That's why they're in separate units."

"Duun-hatani, I might not know enough!"

"Whatever you do don't lie and don't flinch. No one ever knows enough. That's all I can tell you now. Two rules. A third. Remember Sheon.

Remember the knife on your pillow. Remember the pebble-game. But always be polite."

They came screaming in at a runway that jutted out into the sea, braked in a straining effort, and turned sharper than seemed likely toward another collection of buildings and aircraft of all sizes, most small.

And none sleek as their own. "Well," Duun said, "no one's beat us here except the locals and the happen-bys."

Thorn looked, searching. There were insignia on most of the craft. Some were striped and most were white. A copter waited, rotors turning. "Is that ours?"

"We'll hope it is." Duun's hand gripped his, painfully hard. "Hear me. From here on there will be no mistakes, Haras-hatani."

A massive building spread across the land beyond the airport. They had it in sight as they came in, a flat sprawl unlike other buildings Thorn knew. Gray stone. Hatani gray. The guild-hall.

Avenen.

The plane stopped. Engine-sound dwindled. A vehicle whisked up and towed a ladder into place. The canopy slid back, admitting chill wind.

Duun pitched their baggage out into an attendant's hands, climbed out and Thorn followed in haste. (Think, think, watch these attendants, watch everything.)

(Is it all some test? Did Duun lie? Are there really ghotanin after us and would they come here?)

Duun recovered the bundle of their belongings and headed for the copter. Thorn ran at his heels, mask flapping and the suit impairing his movements. (Watch these people. Watch all of them, watch their hands.)

Up the short couple of steps into the copter, the pilot in his place. (Duun's nose is better. He'd smell fear if that man meant trouble, even through all this oil stink.) Thorn fell into his seat beside Duun and belted in as the copter lifted, turned, heaved itself off in its tilted fashion and ground flew along in surreal intimacy after the courier-plane's sun-dazzled altitude. There was only the illusion of speed. It took long minutes to come gliding over the gray walls, over buildings that looked like a dozen architects had quarreled and each changed the plan.

A landing circle came up on a rooftop. There were men standing near it, gray-cloaked, looking up at them as the copter settled.

"They're all right," Duun said. "One thing you can believe: no ghota would wear that color here." The rotors slowed and Duun handed Thorn the baggage and climbed out.

Thorn dropped off the step and followed Duun out from under the blades. The copter roared off again, pelting them with dust, fluttering the gray cloaks.

Duun took his helmet off and walked with it under his arm. Thorn managed the bundle enough to get his off and the wind caught his hair, cold and unforgiving. He looked at the five standing there to meet them, handsome men, one he thought was a woman, all in their gray cloaks and black kilts; and he and Duun were disheveled and dangling masks and hoses like two animate machines lately disconnected. They gazed at Duun and at him-for the first time, at him who had no like, at blowing hair and his smooth face in all its strangeness, and he could not read what they thought. That before anything else convinced him where he was. No one but Duun could go so unreadable to him until now.

But these could. These great sprawling buildings were full of those who could, every one.

"He's more imposing than the pictures would indicate," Tangan said, a wisp of a man, so old his cheeks were gaunt and even his crest had whitened. The hands clasped in his lap were gaunt and crossed with knife scars, gotten in a youth so long ago it stretched into myth in the Guild, among novices. Duun sat on the white sand which novices had raked into artistic patterns among the five huge rocks which adorned this ancient room. The lights here were electric but that was the only change from the fifth century. Generations of hatani hands had worn these great boulders dark, smoothing them as surely as the river had from which they were taken. Generations of irreverent novices had sat on them and perched there to do their raking, springing from one to the other and (sometimes, novices being the same in every generation) making it a game, leaping and jumping and thrusting at one another with rake handles.

Tangan had caught a certain rebel and oft-warned novice in that game, among others. And Duun had rued it. Four ten-days of cleaning the sand by hand. It shocked him, how much this man had aged.

"I've gotten used to his looks," Duun said.

"Have you?"

Duun met Tangan's guarded stare. "I've had near twenty years."

"Twenty years of power beyond any precedent."

"Sixteen hiding on a mountain, in a woods. Five performing unmentionable tasks which teach any man humility. So does dealing with Dsonan."

"Ah. How is the capital?"

"Carrying news to you is like bringing water to the well."

"How is the capital?"

"There are more ways to cheat on an agreement than they teach here, Tangan-hatani."

"Paradoxically prosperous times. Money. Is that what you see?"

"A lot of new money-paid out in the least educated provinces, to elect fools who'll take orders, who can only see ways to entrench themselves and make sure contracts go to the right companies. Some of these fools are evident, and shrewd country-folk keep voting them in because the powers in their districts might buy one ten times worse and far more subtle. I tell you we should send one of the novices walking in Elsnuunan and Yoth. Some herder might be passionate enough on some given day to pose us a question. But some of these fools have passed for astute councillors, and protect themselves so well they make and break young politicians on their own."

"Shbit no Lgoth?"

"He will want to challenge."

"He has. His agent is on the way."

Duun smiled softly. "This will be a ghota, I suspect."

"You know this person?"

"Likely we've met."

"You're managing Shbit, then. How well?"

"I could do better. My hours have been occupied. So this man is a danger. I would have removed him arbitrarily but I was crippled by too much power. I could have done too much. So I could do nothing."

"I predicted this."

"I predicted Shbit but I didn't know what his name would be. There was too much money being made. And I was in Sheon wiping noses. Master, you know an answer, maybe: was there another way?"

Long silence. Tangan laced his hands and studied them and looked up. "I saw where you might put us. I thought back over all my years and all the years of the Guild and wondered where the crux was. I think it was when walls were raised. Everything led to this. You put us in a hard place; if we deny him protection we light the fire that will destroy us; if we take him we loose a firestorm. I don't want to contemplate this choice. I'm being frank with you: I ask myself at night how I taught my student that you find yourself capable of this. A hatani ought to have a flaw. A hatani ought to doubt himself enough to have a little guilt of his own. You have none. You burn with too much light, Duun-hatani. You blind me. I can't see whether you're right or wrong. Perhaps it will stop mattering. Perhaps the dark comes next. I confess to trusting you in one thing; I confess to cowardice in this. I didn't believe you'd come here, even when I knew you were training him. Free-hatani would have been my solution."

Duun contemplated a long while. "Master, you say in one breath you predicted my powerlessness; in the next you say you couldn't predict my coming here at the last."

"To infect us with your powerlessness?"

Duun looked up. "Tangan-hatani, in many respects he's a boy like other boys. Remember that."

"Is that your wisdom?"

"Tangan-hatani, if I'm a fire I'm the safer for having had a hearth to burn in."

"Do we make a lamp out of this one and set him on a shelf?"

"You might, but I'd hope it's a damn steady one."

"Keep him here?"

"Set him where you choose. The guild itself is a principal in this solution. So am I. I let you judge."

"We have another choice."

"The guild won't abdicate this."

"Do you predict what the Guild will do?"

"Is that anger, master Tangan?"

"Of course not. It's overweening pride. My student has set us all in a trap. Angmen must have felt pride like that when Chena pulled the guild gates down."

Duun folded his hands in his lap. "You'll handle it."

"Do the scars ache, Duun-hatani? You were such an agile student."

(Strike and draw.) "I have my ways of compensating, Tangan-hatani. You taught me patience, after all."

Thorn searched the room they gave him: it was a comfortable one, all bare wood and aged stone. A fire of real wood burned in the hearth: he had not had that comfort since Sheon, and it might have lured him at once to warm himself there. They gave him water with the assurance it was safe; they gave his meat and cheese with a confection of preserved beanberries. They gave him a bed of furs, and the sand on the floor was white and fine and deep, newly baked and arranged in meticulous spirals. In the next room a hot bath was waiting, milky with aromatics and soothing oils. They smiled at him, hatani smiles, neither false nor true.

And he searched the place, hunting pebbles. There were none. He was thirsty after the long flight and the running. His limbs were chafed and sweaty from the flight suit. He had set their baggage on the wooden riser that was also the bureau. "Is that gray cloak yours?" a hatani had asked, watching while he unfolded these things. "No," Thorn had said with a clear-eyed stare, knowing that they knew whose it was. "It must be Duun's," that hatani said. "It is," Thorn said back. "Give me his belongings," the hatani said then; "I'll put them in his room."

Thorn had smiled then, as certainly as he could. "I'd be a fool to disobey him; forgive me, hatani: when he blames you, tell him it was my fault. In my inexperience I couldn't tell what to do, so I followed his orders."

Another hatani had come up beside him then and reached out his hand. "Please, visitor: let me at least put these things away for you."

"No," Thorn had said, turning the hand with a slow move of his own. "No, hatani. Forgive me."

That hatani drew back. "No one will trouble you till morning, visitor," the other said. They closed the door behind them.

(It can't be that easy. There's another trick.)

Thorn searched for it. He stripped off the suit, down to his small-kilt. He investigated the food, breaking up the cheese and tearing the meat apart. He drained the tub. He turned out the bed. He searched the closet and pulled out the bureau drawer to look at the space behind it. He racked his brain then. (Even the furniture could hide something.) So he probed the boards of the closet, he investigated the toilet and the bathtub riser, and the sink.

The faucet was dry. That was one thing amiss.

He felt into it and found nothing. (Damn. Something's wrong there. Maybe it's to prevent my drinking that and not the pitcher.) He tried to move even the tub and the bed and the big riser near it. He investigated the walls.

And finally, he knelt down in the corner near the door and began to move the deep sand.

He found the small panel in the stone beneath when he had shifted half the sand in the room. He was panting by then. He wiped at his face with a dry and dusty arm. (No.) He remembered Sagot's fish and the bird. Duun laying his pebble on the table beside the teapot. (Trust nothing.)

He got his dress kilt and pried up the panel with his thumbnail through the cloth. He laid it back. There was a pebble in a small recess. He went to the bureau, got his razor from his kit and a square of tissue. And with that he raked the pebble out and wrapped it in tissue, replaced the lid and contemplated the long wave of sand which wanted redistributing.

("Be polite.") Perhaps it extended to leaving the room in order.

And then another thought came creeping into his mind. ("Snap. No bird. See what assumptions do?")

(Fish and bird. Pebble and pot.)

(Is there any assurance there's no second stone?)

Half the room remained. (And-gods-how much time? It might be in the sand. I can't move it except by hand.)

He put the one stone securely in his belt and started scooping the rest of the sand away.

The other secret well was in the far corner. There was no third. He stared at a great mound of sand over by the door and went and cleared the plate of the mangled food, and with the plate scooped and scattered sand as quickly as he could. His back and arms ached; his knees were raw, for all that he had tried to pad them with his spare clothing in his crawling about. His hands were abraded of their calluses, all the protection he acquired on them. He was thirsty and thanked the gods he had had breakfast at least, for he would not touch the food. (There might be a pebble in the source vessel, not even in this room. How could I trust it? And the sink. Something's wrong. Do I fail if I don't use the safe things? I'm sweaty. I smell awful. I can't go to any interview smelling like this. I look like this and now I have to offend their noses too. And I've used the only change of clothes I had.)

(Use Duun's? Gods, no.)

(What time is it?)

Thorn threw sand and spread it, waded into it and kicked it as level as he could with his feet and tried to think. He stood panting, returned to the bath and worked at the sink plumbing until his hands bled. Nothing budged it, and he sat on the cold tiles with his legs going numb. (It's not going to give. It's just the pitcher they want me to use, that's all.) And his mouth was dry, his throat raw with dust and exertion. (I've won. There were two pebbles. I've got them both. I won't drink the water, I won't eat the food; I won't sleep in the bed.)

(The mattress. Is there a rule about not breaking things?)

(In Duun's game we never did.)

(His rules. He'd have taught me. He'd have done it right.)

He heaved himself up off the tiles, limped in to the warm sand in front of the fire and sank down there, gritty and sweaty and chilled. (Gods, at least I can use the razor and the lotion I brought. That smells good. Maybe it will cover some of my stink.)

(I daren't sleep. They promised no one would bother me. I daren't believe that either.)

He felt after the pebbles in his belt and took out his prizes, never touching them with his fingers. They lay in the tissue, each unique, one with a white vein, the other white with a black. (Would someone ever cheat?)

(Fool!)

He looked at the fire, the abundant embers in the grate.

He went to the table and got the pitcher and poured it out on the coals. A great hissing of steam rose up and there was still a vivid glow in the coals.

(Oh, damn, damn, damn! The bath I drained. The water that won't run.)

He took the pitcher to the bath and tried the taps again, got down on his knees and dipped out all the water in the toilet with his hands: it filled the pitcher once.

The coals had livened again when he got back. He poured the water on and got the platter and poured sand on, waited a while and scooped some of it out with the platter. There was still heat. There had been a metal grate beneath the logs. The coals lay at a forearm's depth in sand.

(How much time? O gods, I daren't wait for this.)

He cast the top sand away. He got down to the coals and used his razor again to rake them onto the platter, to turn them and examine them. Bit by bit the collection in the bathroom grew; and he got down to the deeper coals and into the heat. There was a metal grate. He got that out using his flight helmet for a hook. He moved more coals, and heat cracked the plate in two. He used the larger piece and raked more gingerly. His hands blistered now. The pain was a new encounter every time he reached in; everything he held was hot. The shard broke again and one by one the pieces he used broke to smaller and smaller shards. He abandoned his taking the coals to the bath, he only slid them out onto the sand and examined them and reached back for more. He set his knee on a hot ember and tears blurred his eyes, ran on his face and dried.

From far down in the coals, he scooped out a small black ember which was too regular and too smooth. He rolled it in the sand to cool it and scratched it with his razor. It was a pebble.

He wrapped it with the rest and never flinched at the heat. (Should I stop hunting?)

He kept going, to the last. Off to the side of the hearth, beneath old ash, he found a metal trap, and pried that open with his razor. He burned himself again getting out the small stone at the bottom. But he rolled it into the tissue too, and gingerly searched what little ash was left until he was sure there were no more.

He sat down then, slumped with his arms on his knees until he had rested. And then he began to pick the grate and the dead coals up and restore them to the fireplace.

The door opened when he was in the middle of this task. The hatani who had put him into the room were back. They looked about the room.

One walked into the bath and came back again, and Thorn got to his feet.

"Come with us," the first hatani said.

Thorn took his sooty kilt and wrapped it about himself, then started gathering up all the rest of his and Duun's belongings, every one.

"Visitor," the other said, "it's clear you're not leaving, from the condition of this room. There's no need to pack."

"Please." Thorn wrapped Duun's cloak and change of clothing in his flight suit, which, with the cloak, was the only thing left unsoiled. He gathered his razor off the floor and put it in the helmet along with the lotion bottles.

"Oh, don't be a fool!" the other said. "They'll laugh at you in the hall. You're going to meet master Tangan, with all the hatani in the house! You can't drag all that stuff in!"

"I never got to give Duun his cloak. I don't know. I might lose these things. I'll let him tell me what to do."

"Come on, then, fool. But I warn you they'll laugh. Gods-you're filthy. Do you want a change of clothes? I can lend you some."

"Thank you. I'll ask Duun when I see him."

The other gestured at the open door.

The corridor gave way to an open hall, a pit sided with many steps; and gray-cloaked hatani sat on those steps, hundreds of them. The floor was sanded and swirled with raking. There were great boulders on the sand. On each of them a hatani sat.

At the bottom of the steps in front of him stood Duun, the only one without a cloak. Duun lifted his chin slightly and Thorn walked down the steps, his escort behind him.

"You brought my cloak," Duun said. "Have they touched it at all?"

"No, Duun-hatani."

Duun held out his hand and took it and put it on. Duun extended his hand toward the farthest of the rocks. "The last is master Tangen."

Thorn walked down and across the sand, along the narrow path the hatani on the boulders had walked, like the form of a tree. He heard others walk behind him. He stopped in front of the farthest. His belongings were still in his arms.

"You may set those things down." master Tangan said, and lifted his hand in that way Duun had which meant a thing could be trusted. "You will stand." Duun came and stood near him. The two who had brought him stood on the other side. Thorn set his belongings on the ground in front of him.

"You are untidy, young man," Tangan said. "Is this a way to come to this hall?"

"Forgive me, master Tangan."

"Was there something amiss with the room?"

Thorn hesitated. It seemed the right question. He reached into his belt and drew out the tissue. He unfolded it and showed the pebbles. His burns hurt and his sooty hands bled onto the tissue, shaking in spite of all he could do. (Were they all? Did I miss one?)

"Did he drink the water?"

"The pitcher was empty," one of his escorts said.

"Did he eat the food?"

"The food was crumbled," the other said.

"There was a pebble in the pitcher from which that pitcher was poured. There was a pebble in the plate from which that plate was served. Did you drink or eat?"

"No, master Tangan. I poured the water on the fire. I didn't eat. I didn't touch my hand to my mouth after touching the food."

"How can I know this is the truth?"

At first it seemed an accusation. Then it occurred to him it was another question. "You're hatani, master Tangan. If I couldn't find a trick like that you could read me too."

A moment of silence, all about the room. "Did you bathe?"

"No, master Tangan."

"That seems evident."

He was too weary. He only stared up at Tangan, still holding the pebbles.

"What did you do with the water?"

"I let it out, master Tangan, hunting for pebbles."

"Was there one?"

"Not in that tub."

"Lay the pebbles that you found on the sand one by one."

Thorn bent and slipped them from the tissue one at a time. At the third there was a stirring in the seats; at the fourth a greater stirring. He straightened and looked up at the old, old man.

"Four is unusual," master Tangan said simply. "Two beyond the food and water would have passed you. That's the first test. The second is myself. Tell me the worst thing you ever did."

Almost Thorn let his face react. And stopped himself. He thought a moment. (Losing Sheon? But that wasn't from knowledge. That was my ignorance. That blames Duun.) "I shouted at my teacher Sagot, master Tangan. Yesterday."

"Have you stolen?"

"Only from Duun."

There was another stirring in the seats.

"Have you lied?"

"Sometimes."

"Have you killed anyone?"

"No, master Tangan."

"Have you used your skill in a wrong way?"

He shut his eyes. And opened them. It was easy to count. "Three times, master Tangan. When I shouted at Sagot and when I hit another student and when I threatened him."

"You're very fast on that answer. Aren't there more?"

Thorn thought again. "I've quarreled with Duun."

"So have I, visitor." A mild ripple of laughter went about the hall. Beside him Duun ducked his head. The master's face never changed. "We have a case in the guild. One member claims a knife another claims. How will you resolve it?"

Thorn bit his lip. Panic rushed through him. (It's a wrong question. There's no answer. Dare I say that?) He found himself shivering in the chill. "Master Tangan, there aren't any such hatani in the guild, who would quarrel over property."

"We have another case. Two sisters marry a man for a one-year each in succession. But no sooner has the first marriage been consummated than the man divorces that wife and marries a third for a three-year. How will you judge?"

"Master Tangan, how do they make the question?"

"The first sister says: Judge between me and my sister and that woman."

(Not the man.)

"That's not a hatani matter, master Tangan. They ought to go to the magistrate."

"They persist. They make the same request."

"Where is their property?"

"They have a house and shop from their father and mother. The man is living and working with the new wife in a property he owns. The new wife is tanun-guild."

"Let them go live in their own house and find a new husband."

"Explain."

"The women want this man more than he wants them and they hate the new wife. They could never share with her."

Master Tangan lifted a hand. Beckoned to someone. Thorn resisted the impulse to turn, but he heard someone walking up. More than one.

"One more case," Master Tangan said. "Look at this woman."

Thorn turned and his heart jolted.

It was Betan. Betan, in a pale blue kilt, a dark blue cloak, with her hands folding before her and her ears laid flat. Her scent reached him on a waft of wind. It was still flowers.

(O Betan.) Exhaustion battered at him. (Hatani after all?)

Her face betrayed nothing.

"Look at me," Master Tangan said. "This woman accuses you of assaulting her. Of using your persuasion to seduce her and when she saw you naked and knew your physical difference would harm her, she tried to get away, and you used your skill to restrain her until Duun no Lughn intervened. She asks a hatani judgment of me."

(Was that what she thought? Was that what I did?)

"What do you say?"

"I-was in a room alone with her. Everything she says could be true."

"Duun-hatani, you were a witness."

"I came in and this woman ran out," Duun said. "I ordered her to leave. I witnessed an embrace in which the woman struggled and broke free."

"As you came in."

"Yes, master Tangan."

"What else did you observe?"

"Anger on my student's part, toward me. He said: 'I wish you had come later.' The woman said nothing. Later my student said. 'I wanted to love her.' I explained the differences would have harmed her."

"He had no knowledge of this?"

"It's possible he didn't understand."

"Did you?"

"No. Yes." Thorn struggled for his composure.

"I pushed her back, master Tangan. She smelled afraid and I pushed her back."

"Away from you."

"He's lying," Betan said, "He's hatani and he's lying with a straight face."

"What do you ask for him?"

"Send him back to Dsonan. Don't let him in the guild."

"What do you ask for her, visitor?"

"I think it's a trap," Thorn said. "I think this is another test and she's hatani."

"Why do you say that?"

"She moves like one."

"You're wrong, young man. She's not hatani, free or guilded."

"She's ghota," Duun said. "Or I'm blind. And she's a fool to come here."

Betan stood there. (Ghota?) Thorn stared at her. He had expected men with guns. (Betan? Ghota?)

"This is my judgment," Tangan said. "Leave this house. I'll not begin a guild war. You have half an hour to reach the airport. Take my warning seriously."

Betan turned on her heel and walked, carefully, up the track past the hatani on the boulders, up the steps at the end of the hall. Thorn trembled, but it was cold; it was the burns. Where Betan had been, where part of his youth had been, was cold inside.

"One more question," Tangan said.

"Master?" Thorn turned and looked up at the old man on the rock.

"What have you done today that you take the most pride in?"

Thorn blinked. It betrayed him and he was chagrined, but his eyes stung and his knees wobbled under him. "Getting Duun's cloak here."

There was laughter, all round the room, stinging laughter, hoarse and harsh.

"It's a novice's trick," master Tangan said. His face relaxed and kindness came through. "Novices who grow up in the guild house never get caught by that, except the first day they arrive. But you weren't told. And you honor your teacher. They laugh because you found four pebbles besides the water and the food. That's very rare. I do fault you on letting the water out. But you made it up the hard way. Those burns will scar, young man. I think you should get them treated before we send you back."

(I've lost, then.)

"You're apprenticed to Duun no Lughn for as long as Duun sees fit. Beyond that point you'll do as you see fit. You have the wisdom to refrain from judgment where you have no knowledge. That's very important. Be gentle. Be merciful. Give true judgments. All other rules of the guild flow from these. A free-hatani judges and the guild will not involve itself. When you judge, the guild will shed blood to back you. Always remember that, Haras-hatani."

"Yes, master Tangan." And for a moment the master's face let him see past another barrier. (This is a worried man. The hatani up there see it now. They were startled into laughter. There is anger in this room.) He slid his glance toward Duun and saw the other half of that expression. (They know something. No. Duun knows and master Tangan discovers it.)

"Take him and get those burns looked to, Duun-hatani."